"The Millennium of The Tale of Genji".

The Museum of Kyoto, JAPAN April 26 * June 8, 2008

Murasaki Shikubu's immensely long The Tale of Genji (1008), the first great novel, has always been famous in her native country. It's the canonical Japanese literary work of art, and so has often been illustrated by that country's artists. This large exhibition of 157 artifacts, on two floors of the Kyoto museum, includes a genealogical chart, diaries, drawings, folding screens, a lacquered dresser, Japanese lutes and harps, manuscripts, playing cards, picture scrolls, printed editions of the novel, tea bowls, translations in many languages, and woodblock images. How exotic, indeed, is this world. Looking at the thirteenth-century picture scrolls showing the author, one enters into a marvelous aesthetic realm, a place where, after a gentleman made love to a lady, he was expected to compose a suitable poem on appropriate paper. ("An invitation to chastity," murmured one American companion.) This story of obsessive love in an extremely hierarchical society could easily have come from olden times in Europe. Saint-Simon would have felt quite at home in Shikubu's Japan, once he mastered its rituals.

When first translated into English by Arthur Waley, who was associated with the Bloomsbury Group, The Tale of Genji (published in 6 volumes from 1921 to 1933) seemed Proustian. Spying on a woman, Genji slips in between the blinds. As Norma Field explains in Splendor of Longing in the Tale of Genji (1987), "They had not yet secured the shutter ... and a gap remained.... The nearer end of a screen was folded, and the heat probably explained why a curtain that should have blocked his view had been draped over its stand, so that he could see quite well." Many artists have taken up the challenge of illustrating the text. But reading this scene from the third chapter of Royall Tyler's recent Penguin translation, although it is not easy to envisage the setting, we can understand what entices Genji. "Tall, very fair-skinned, and nicely rounded ... she was a pleasure to look at." Compare the episode in Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-22) when Marcel spies on M. de Charlus and Jupien making out: "The staging of the things ... that I witnessed was always of the rashest and least probable nature, as if such revelations had to be the reward only for an action full of risk, though partly clandestine." Unlike the Genji, he only hears but does not see. In Paris, as in Japan, extremely privileged lovers with time on their hands could afford to live aesthetic lives. But nowadays even an art tourist who only knows Japan from its museums and restaurants can recognize this world in which subtle discriminations were all-important.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

There is a great deal of continuity in the history of this Buddhist culture. And so, although most of the images in this exhibition are from the seventeenth-century Endo period, historically distant from the world of the novel, when seeing these folding screens and scrolls, art forms not made for the public spaces of museums, we feel taken into the book. The psychology of Shikubu's masterpiece may feel impossibly distant, but when Genji stages a picture contest, art writers find themselves in a familiar world.

"Those scenes of the four seasons, painted by the old masters so fluently and with so keen an eye, were incomparable, but their scope was limited after all, and it could not convey the rich fullness of mountains and waters; so that the more ephemeral modern ones ... proved just as lively and entertaining...." Accordingly, we world art historians need to understand how aesthetic pleasure in the fine literary and visual arts is universal, although the forms in which it is presented, as in the magnificent calligraphy of this exhibition, prove over time to be culturally parochial. Look at Commes Des Garcons or the parody label Comme Ca and you should instantly recognize how present-day Japanese designers draw on this venerable tradition.